


two better hemispheres

by extasiswings



Category: Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, First Kiss, Missing Scenes, That Last Night in Oxford
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-12-26 07:26:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18278576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/extasiswings/pseuds/extasiswings
Summary: “Then...no. Not yet. I think I—that is to say, Peter,” Harriet caught his eyes and found them softer than she had ever seen, as if he knew her mind even before she managed the words, “the rest of the world can have you then, and I will not begrudge it that, but for tonight...I would rather like to be selfish with you tonight, if it’s all the same to you.”[A postscript toGaudy Night.]





	two better hemispheres

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OldShrewsburyian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/gifts).



One might have expected, after the acceptance of a proposal made and rejected more times than a person could count, that two wearied intellectuals might have had more to say on the subject. But then, Harriet considered in the silence that fell following her gentle acquiescence, they had both of them done quite a bit of talking in recent days. 

She half-expected to feel different, or at least for her long-held fears to rear up once more—and yet, they did not. Her mind did not burst into a chorus of alarm, did not provide her with a litany of her sins to dissuade her from her choice. Instead, that too was quiet, but for the faint echoes of the event itself. 

_Placetne, magistra?_

_Placet._

It was right, she thought, that Peter should ask her at Oxford. What was it he said?— _I knew that from anything you said to me here, there could be no going back_. And had she not known the same? Oxford, where he could take up her gown by accident and the mistake would be all but indistinguishable. Oxford, where in many respects the both of them were more themselves than anywhere else. 

No, there could be no going back. 

Harriet’s hand slid unbidden up from its resting place on Peter’s chest to touch his face. Her fingers buzzed as she traced the lines of him, those features she had catalogued with only her eyes that day on the river—it was as though her blood had been replaced with champagne, all fizz and sparking sweetness—and Peter himself stood perfectly still, allowing her the exploration until her fingers paused over his lips. 

“Harriet...” his voice was rough with emotion, his fingers tightening around the cap in his hands, “darling, will you kiss me?”

_Oh._ For of course, he would not allow her even then to be passive in the subject of her own desire, or his. Harriet did not bother to waste time with words—and why should she? They had five years between them, of demurrals and denials and fear, and it had been even longer since she locked away want in deference to good sense and practicality. Long enough. 

The first kiss was an unpracticed one—innocent, with no small amount of shy uncertainty despite her internal conviction. But between the first and the second, Peter dropped his cap in favor of touching her in return—a hand splayed over her back, the other on her cheek—and it became something altogether more settled, more sure. 

_I have been facing one fact for some time, and that is, that if I once gave way to Peter, I should go up like straw._

Perhaps, Harriet thought, as she kissed him a third time, and then a fourth, and a fifth. But the world had not ended when she agreed to marry him. The ground had not broken beneath her feet. And she had not lost anything of herself that he would not return to her at the slightest indication. 

_How often has he used that weapon against you?_

_Never._

When Peter finally pulled away, so long after they began that Harriet had lost all sense of time, she nearly protested—she had forgotten the feeling of certain intimacies, a pile of kindling lying dormant, growing brittle and cracked until a lucky spark reminded it how to burn. Having been so reminded, it was difficult in the instant moment to accept the suggestion of more sensible parts of her mind that they not throw kerosene on the whole thing. 

“Shall I walk you home?” Peter asked, pleasantly breathless in a way that gave her a great deal of satisfaction for having caused it. For such an innocuous question, it provoked a visceral reaction; Harriet could not imagine anything she would like less than to return to Shrewsbury and be parted from him just yet. 

“You leave tomorrow,” she said. 

“Yes. No getting around it, I’m afraid.”

“Then...no. Not yet. I think I—that is to say, Peter,” Harriet caught his eyes and found them softer than she had ever seen, as if he knew her mind even before she managed the words, “the rest of the world can have you then, and I will not begrudge it that, but for tonight...I would rather like to be selfish with you tonight, if it’s all the same to you.” 

He kissed her again, quick and delighted. 

“I am entirely at your disposal, my dear.”

Later, many hours later, after another walk and a punting adventure involving activities that ventured closer to kerosene than either of them may have originally intended, he did return her safely—if in a somewhat more disheveled condition—to the college. Harriet spared half a moment to check her watch, noting vaguely that were she ten years younger she would have been in a great deal of trouble; she bit back a smile at a pang of sympathy for the Mr. Pomfrets and Miss Cattermoles of the world. She finally understood how easy it could be to feel like there were not enough hours in a single night to spend with one’s beloved, and she not even restrained by a curfew. 

But, sensibility needed to prevail, sleep needed to be had. If it was to be Rome again for Peter, as he suspected, she should not send him off at a disadvantage, already exhausted. With reluctance then, Harriet extracted herself from his embrace and turned to leave. 

He caught her hand. 

“It occurs to me, that for all my persistence in the asking, I never presumed so far as to procure an engagement ring.”

“Peter, I don’t need—“

“Please.” He pressed something into her hand—his signet ring, she realized when she looked down. “If you will allow me a moment to be foolish—I have had this dream before, of perfect, incandescent happiness, only to wake up and be forced to contend with reality. And tonight has felt so very much like a dream in itself that I have expected to wake more times than I can count.”

“But if I take this, later you will have cause to know it was real.”

“Yes, you see it.”

Harriet allowed him to slide it onto her finger, although it made for a somewhat comical picture, not quite large enough to immediately slip off, but not small enough that it fit her hand either.

“That seems rather precarious—are you quite sure you trust me not to lose it?” A wicked tease, for even in saying so, Harriet had already curled her finger to stop the ring from any attempts at escape. Even in saying so, she swayed back into him, tipping her face up for another kiss. 

He was not the only one of them to have had dreams after all; he was not the only one who might be grateful for a reminder. 

“For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,” Peter quoted, before taking the offered invitation. 

It was several minutes more before Harriet made it back to her room. 

One last gaudy night, indeed.

**Author's Note:**

> I read these books for the first time this week and was entirely overcome, which for me generally means that I end up writing. And the combination of the last lines of Gaudy Night with the grumbling Proctor dismayed over Senior Members "passionately embracing in New College Lane right under the Warden's window" and the Dowager's journal notes in Busman's Honeymoon that they apparently "sat up half the night kissing one another madly in a punt" and "if it hadn't been for his signet-ring that he put on her hand all in a hurry at the last moment it might have all been a dream" proved far too much to resist. 
> 
> Title shamelessly drawn from John Donne's "The Good-Morrow" and Peter's last quote from "The Canonization."


End file.
